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Living within a living, loving planet
Archive for May, 2013
John Michael Greer
May 29th
John Michael Greer
“John Michael Greer is the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America and the author of more than twenty books on a wide range of subjects, including The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age, The Ecotechnic Future: Exploring a Post-Peak World, and The Wealth of Nature: Economics As If Survival Mattered. He lives in Cumberland, MD, an old red brick mill town in the north central Appalachians, with his wife Sara.”
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk/
I don’t recall ever reading a series of reports, extremely candid, clever and well organised essays actually, that held my interest like these. I think you are missing something special if you don’t have a peak at them from time to time.
Soon, I will be reporting on his latest, I think, book entitled “Apocalypse NOT, Everything you Know About 2012, Nostradamus and the Rapture is Wrong” I bought the book immediately after reading, with horror, that 47% of the members of the Republican party believe in some degree or some form of Apocalypse, especially the Rapture. I must admit that I have not read his other books but if they are anything like this one, they’ll be terrific.
What is so good about this book? 1st, I am very personally interested in knowing more about this Rapture and 2nd coming phenomenon. It scares and deeply saddens me to know that so many people applaud ecocide because they think it brings them closer to when they will be wafted up into heaven. Before reading Greer’s book, I found it unbelievable. Now I believe it and understand where it and other apocalyptic ideas came from. 2nd, John’s style is clear, to the point and flowing. Even if you were not especially interested in the subject, it would most likely interest you. 3rd, As a retired technical instructor who is always interested in better methods of presenting material, I like it that John subtly and interestingly follows a method that I learned in my Train the Trainer course. 1st, Tell ‘em what your going to tell ‘em – 2nd, Tell ‘em and 3rd, tell ‘em what you told ‘em. There are even cleverly written transitions at the end of each section moving you smoothly into the next point. These things are sorely lacking in most non-fiction I read.
If your not sure what the Rapture is, then I strongly suggest looking it up. You can start here. http://christianity.about.com/od/faqhelpdesk/a/whatisrapture.htm
If you want an eyeful, then have a link at this link; http://www.thewarningsecondcoming.com/
Uncertainty doesn’t mean it might not happen
May 28th
Uncertainty no excuse for procrastinating on climate change
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Uncertaint-no-excuse-for-procrastinating-on-climate-change.html
Posted on 27 May 2013 by dkaroly
By Roger Bodman, Victoria University and David Karoly, University of Melbourne
“Today we released research which reduces the range of uncertainty in future global warming. It does not alter the fact we will never be certain about how, exactly, the climate will change.
We always have to make decisions when there are uncertainties about the future: whether to take an umbrella when we go outside, how much to spend on insurance. International action on climate change is just one more decision that has to be made in an environment of uncertainty.”
Just look at human medical science, medical treatment, diagnosis etc. There is no certainty. Chemo works for some and not for others. Radiation works for some and not for others. The major reason is that we are living beings composed of many layers of functionality – all composed of living beings. Our innards are not small machines and thus unpredictable. Although not emotionally, logically we accept that often our medical practitioners give us medicine and tell us to come back in two weeks if the medicine doesn’t work. We do so if we don’t die in the meantime. The likelihood of catching a life threatening infection whilst in a hospital is frightening – those who are not frightened are in denial or just don’t read or watch the media. Sure, most hospitals work hard to keep their environment safe, but they are dealing with living systems and their behaviour contains a large dose of uncertainty. So what?
Earth is a complex living system. Slowly, establishment science is awakening to the need to have another serious look at the definition of aliveness. Aliveness doesn’t spring from deadness. Some of the substance of what has been labeled Emergence makes sense. However, I strongly suggest that life doesn’t emerge from non-life – doesn’t and never did. Gaia, Earth, is alive; is a living system and until we deal with this aspect of being alive IN a living system, just as our cells are alive within our organs, we will never be able to progress in our understanding of how the Earth “works.” We desperately need to understand more about Earthly behaviour.
We cannot do so whilst we see her as deaf and dumb and dead.
Good Point
May 27th
This is a foundational idea of the Wholesome Food Association. Unfortunately, it seems that so many people have been taught that food is either certified organic or poisoned. Local common sense and integrity is not trusted. An inspection system presupposes that a grower cannot be trusted not to poison the food. Advertising the inspection system propagates the idea that people, generally, cannot be trusted. Yes, there are cheaters, but they are few and far between. Believe me; some certified organic growers find a way to cheat despite the inspection system. What the inspection system verifies is that on the day of the inspection, no cheating was revealed. Nobody in their right mind would keep and display a receipt for the purchase of pesticides etc. Perhaps the inspection of records and receipts is used to calculate the extra amount [by percentage] of fees owed the certification body. It has always amazed me that lots of people will trust a company in the business of inspections, in another country where they have no way of checking them out rather than taking an interest in where their food comes from and satisfying themselves by investigation, visitation, etc. that their local producer is honest. With local food, the grower may be visited and verified. Word gets around and a reputation is then acquired and constantly maintained.
Locally produced food is the way forward as we repeatedly see evidence that the global food market has turned into a profit driven vehicle for shoddy, non-nutritious substitutes for wholesome food. If you want nutritious food and a thriving local economy, then seek out your local food producers. However, remember that produced locally does not necessarily mean that the food is not poisoned. Only you, the consumer, can verify the integrity and honesty of those who supply your food.
What’s maintaining health worth to you?
Save the Cardamom Forest
May 26th
Can A Few Monks Save the Cardamom Forest?
By Luke Duggleby May 16, 2013
http://www.theglobalmail.org/feature/can-a-few-monks-save-the-cardamom-forest/614/
“Cambodia’s forests were once described by the World Bank as the country’s “most developmentally important resource”, but according to the international group Global Witness, by 2009 these rich forests had been largely degraded by unrestricted logging, the valuable timber sold off by the political elite for quick, private profits.”
Who gave humans who govern countries the right to pillage and destroy precious trees?
Warming the Problem?
May 20th
As Martin Luther said “For in the true nature of things, if we rightly consider, every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.”
It is not so much that we are having higher temperatures than normal. What defines normal? We are in an interglacial period which has in the past brought global warming. This is a cyclical event – one every 150k/years or so. There is no telling just exactly how warm it will get during this particular interglacial cycle. The important question is not so much why it is getting warmer, but why it is not getting cooler like it has in the past as the cycle turns back into a warm decline leading in centuries back to the, long glacial stage of the cycle? You might say “Oh well, maybe the downturn is just late and will occur in a few hundred years or so.” Observing the climb of CO2 is not surprising really because records show that the graph for average air temperature and the graph for CO2 are nearly synchronous. Which one leads and which one lags is controversial, but that they are nearly synchronous is not controversial.
Now here is the frightening news. The scientific research and media attention is focused on the causes of global warming. The warming event happened over 8,000 years ago.
We need to pay attention to the factors that we think brought down the CO2 and the temperature in the past 3 or 4 interglacial periods. One fact is the temperature dropped quickly, nearly as quickly as it rose. The maximum temperature period has always been short-lived. He present one has gone on longer than most if not all the previous ones. So be it. The two primary differences in the global conditions we face this time as compared to the past both are due to the presence of Homo Sapiens. We have caused extreme desertification coupled with a shortage of ground water and humidity and we have destroyed millions of trees and extensive grasslands. What sucks in carbon dioxide and expels oxygen and water vapour? We all know; vegetation, especially trees and the immense grasslands. I suggest it is almost certain that vegetation is the only possible reason for the steep fall in CO2 that can be observed in the graphs mentioned above.
The Milankovitch cycles and their interaction seem to me to reveal that the orbital forcing combination of eccentricity, obliquity and precession that favours cooling changed a couple of thousand years ago and it looks very much like we have missed a tipping point. Thus it may be centuries before the conditions again favour cooling. By then, our average global temperature may be so high that the tipping point cannot be reached. The following paper was written by two of the most distinguished researchers in the field of Earth Sciences.
An Exceptionally Long Interglacial Ahead? A. Berger and M. F. Loutre see: berger_loutre02.sci.pdf
“Most CO2 scenarios (15) led to an exceptionally long interglacial from 5000 years before the present to 50,000 years from now (see the bottom panel of the figure), with the next glacial maximum in 100,000 years. Only for CO2 concentrations less than 220 ppmv was an early entrance into glaciation simulated (15).”
(15). M. F. Loutre, A. Berger, Clim. Change 46, 61 (2000).
[We are at 400ppm of CO2, climbing at an increasing rate with very little hope of stopping anytime soon.]
The penny has been dropped many times but economic greed coupled with the backing of the 1% trumps common sense. I can’t recommend a workable solution.
I know this is a short explanation but I don’t wish to dig any deeper in this message. See:
| The Seasons and the Earth’s Orbit – Milankovitch Cycles |
http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/seasons_orbit.html
Or if you like my plain talk, see:
http://www.earthenspirituality.com/glogal-warming/
Precious Groundwater
May 20th
Precious Groundwater
“And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains.
This is in many ways a slow-motion crisis — decades in the making, imminent for some, years or decades away for others, hitting one farm but leaving an adjacent one untouched. But across the rolling plains and tarmac-flat farmland near the Kansas-Colorado border, the effects of depletion are evident everywhere. Highway bridges span arid stream beds. Most of the creeks and rivers that once veined the land have dried up as 60 years of pumping have pulled groundwater levels down by scores and even hundreds of feet.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/us/high-plains-aquifer-dwindles-hurting-farmers.html?hpw&_r=0
We came, we saw and we conquered.
May 17th
We look down upon our hands and they are covered in blood. And then we remember being told that we have been made in the image of God.
Genesis 1:28
“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
Slow Travel
May 17th
Air Passenger Travel
1 May 2013
Iata: Air travel rises by 5.9% worldwide
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22369230
“The International Air Transport Association (Iata) says air passenger travel grew by 5.9% in March compared with a year earlier, boosted by emerging markets.”
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
“I was intrigued to read earlier this month a thoughtful essay by leading British climate scientist Kevin Anderson arguing, in terms that will sound very familiar to regular readers of The Archdruid Report, that the failure of climate change activism to make any headway in changing people’s behavior may have more than a little to do with the fact that the people who are urging such changes aren’t making them themselves.”
John Michael Greer’s blog: WEDNESDAY, MAY 15, 2013 http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.co.uk/
Comment by Sky McCain
Although I am aware that air travel and air shipping is on the increase, I felt I needed to gather some facts, the latest if possible. We could guess that air travel was not on the wane nor diminished through at least two indicators. One, noting the huge success of an air show in the UK last year and a recent article on the increased profits of EADS who own Airbus, a successful competitor of Boeing Aerospace. Middle Eastern and Far Eastern countries are buying up aircraft like they were so many corn chips. So are people taking climate change seriously and switching to Rail? By no means. Following is an indication and perhaps a reason why not. People fly because it is cheap and convenient. Some of the more popular holiday spots are on islands that take a lot of time and money to reach by ferry. There are no cut-rate ferry lines like Easyjet, JetBlue, Flybe or RyanAir.
Let us compare prices for a round-trip from London to Heraklion, Crete
London Heathrow round-trip to Heraklion, Crete 122.99 plus £62.17 leaving at midnight! £115 leaving at 2PM. Lowest price £185.16
Flying Easyjet you only have to get to Heathrow.
To go by Train and Ferry, however is a vastly different story. These are round trip estimates.
1st Eurostar London to Paris £150
2nd Paris sleeper [1 berth] to Venice £424
3rd Ferry to Patras £424
4th Bus to Pireaus approx. £25
5th Ferry Pireaus round-trip Heraklion, Crete £224.77
So you see, we have a 3 day journey cost, not including meals totalling £1,023 That’s easily 5 times the cost for your flight holiday in Heraklion
We go a little cheaper by visiting off-season but pay at least 4 times more for staying out of the air. Not many people feel that strongly about staying out of the air unless to visit overseas close family.
Some statistics
There have been continual increases in travel & freight. For instance,
“From 1992 to 2005, passenger kilometers increased 5.2% per year, even with the disruptions of 9/11 and two significant wars. During the first three quarters of 2010, air travel markets expanded at an annualized rate approaching 10%. This is similar to the rate seen in the rapid expansion prior to the recession.”
“In a 2008 presentation[6] and paper [20] Professor Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research showed how continued aviation growth in the UK threatens the ability of that nation to meet CO2 emission reduction goals necessary to contain the century-end temperature increase to even 4 or 6C° …at the UK’s historic annual emission growth rate of 7%. Beyond 2012 if the growth rate were reduced to 3% yearly, carbon emissions in 2030 would be 28 MT, which is 70% of the UK’s entire carbon emissions budget that year for all sectors of society.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviation
Skeptical Science flattens deniers
May 17th
This article is fully supported with links to the supporting data. Hopefully, John Cook has helped us all to utterly dismiss the misconstrued and sometimes utterly false claims of those anthropogenic climate change deniers. I for one am sick of hearing the drivel. I felt it necessary to read it in association with genetically modified food only to find that there were a few “scientists” who were paid to falsify and construe what they could find as detractions. I am aware that some of those same people are now employed to do the same shameless job with climate change. Much of the blame for the false impressions on this subject has to be placed with some of the “media” who give equal time to detractors as if there was an equal chance that they may be right. Most of us have learned that “the media” by and large are only interested in sales and care less about fairness, truth and the art of conveying news.
Unfortunately, so many people make up their minds based on false information and then proceed forever with a closed mind on the issue. That’s why character assassination is accomplished with a lie that gets published and then an apology printed on page 16 in small print. People tend to remember the lie and either never see the retraction or apology or will not read further. They “know” because they read it in the newspaper or some magazine. A good friend of mine taught me that whenever reading something controversial, stop and look into just who is doing the assertions. Find out who finances them – whom do they serve. Find out who tends to gain from their point of view. People with set opinions look for someone to agree with them and then crystalize on their false knowledge like a nut that must never be cracked to see if the kernel is edible.
Their lives are crammed with precious nuts that cannot feed them when the kernels are needed. By then it is too late and they have invested their vital energy in that which does not serve them. Surely it is normal that we change as we age, as we experience the new and different, as we suffer and recover from tragedy and disappointments. We learn to regularly examine our truth nuts, crack open a few to see if they are still serviceable.
The most difficult student is one who already knows. When you give people the impression that you are not completely sure about something then you get their take which, surprisingly, often reveals something you overlooked or misunderstood. Actually, most people feel positively stroked when they get an opportunity to explain their opinions. It is a win-win because they feel good about informing you and you might just learn something.
Hopefully, anthropogenic climate change deniers now lack an audience.
Daily KOS
THU MAY 16, 2013
Skeptical Science flattens deniers: 97% of peer-reviewed papers say humans causing climate change
By Meteor Blades
Nowadays, television news shows and newspaper and magazine articles that mention global warming rarely resort to outright lies like this grotesque piece of propaganda from Forbes.
“In fact, not all scientists do agree that humans are causing global warming. As researchers under the guidance of John Cook at Skeptical Science discovered in a “citizen science” survey of 11,944 peer-reviewed articles, 1.6 percent of the authors expressing an opinion on the subject rejected or were uncertain about the consensus that the earth is undergoing anthropogenic (human-generated) global warming (AGW). And 97.1 percent of the nearly 4,000 articles in which the author(s) took a position endorsed the AGW consensus. (The survey was published May 15 in Environmental Research Letters as an open access article)”
A video
Slash and burn
May 14th
The Great Space Myth
John Naish
Resurgence & Ecologist September/October 2012 Issue 274
Comments on this article made by Sky McCain
While looking through this issue, the following highlight caught my eye and interest. “We must learn to nurture the only place that we are ever likely to inhabit”
John Naish, a prolific writer that has written largely on health issues presents a well-researched and clearly presented case for why we can’t even dream of visiting even other nearby solar systems let alone roam the galaxy unless we do the preposterous: [my take on the situation] Take Earth’s global magnetic field along with us. I’ve checked out the four or five reasons John cites for why we won’t be doing space travel anytime soon – maybe never. They are valid and most well researched
.
The major point in the article that attracted me was the obvious. Why continue the slash and burn as if we could just hitch the buggy up to Ol’ Nell and find another lovely place to ruin. Sorry, but this is it. John mentions the “Kleenix Model of Colonialism” which appears to have been coined by the late writer, Audre Lorde. It must surely mean the absurdly unequal trade situation where the conquerors remove the precious resources and leave the vanquished with Coca Cola and bandaids. I’m not sure how that applies to Homo Sapiens Sapiens and the idea that we don’t have to take care of the planet because we can just get Scotty to beam us up and find another one to ravish.
Stephen Hawking enters left stage toward the end of act 3 having set his brilliance on how to save us all from wearing our soiled jeans. In a recent article in CNET News, Hawking repeats his suggestion that we only have around 1,000 years of plunder time left to us so we had better find another planet ASAP. No mention of alternatives. No looking at options such as a reduction in world population or axing world trade etc. No, just a pronouncement. If I was to write a paper as part of a graduate school curriculum turned in with no supporting arguments, I’d find myself looking for a job waiting tables in the Union Building just before withdrawing from the course. The article states: “In 2011, he said, ‘Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain lurking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.’”
Although I respect Dr. Hawking’s brilliant career achievements in science, can it really be our “only chance”? Seldom in science do you find such certainty. Obviously this certainty isn’t the result of experiment and hypothesis – the scientific method.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57579003-76/stephen-hawking-predicts-end-of-earth-scenario/
Further evidence:
Rover radiation data poses manned Mars mission dilemma
30 May 2013
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22718672
Jonathan Amos
“For most of its 253-day, 560-million-km journey in 2011/2012, the robot had its Radiation Assessment Detector (RAD) instrument switched on inside the cruise vessel, which gave a degree of protection.
RAD counts the numbers of energetic particles – mostly protons – hitting its sensors.
The particles of concern fall into two categories – those that are accelerated away from our dynamic Sun; and those that arrive at high velocity from outside of the Solar System.
This latter category originates from exploded stars and the environs of black holes.
These galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) impart a lot of energy when they strike the human body and will damage DNA in cells. They are also the most difficult to shield against.
Earth’s thick atmosphere, its magnetic field and its huge rock bulk provide protection to people living on its surface, but for astronauts in deep space even an aluminium hull 30cm thick is not going to change their exposure to GCRs very much.
The RAD data revealed an average GCR dose equivalent rate of 1.84 milliSieverts (mSv) per day during the rover’s cruise to Mars. (The Sievert is a standard measure of the biological impacts of radiation.) This dose rate is about the same as having a full-body CT scan in a hospital every five days or so.”
Forget about colonisation, love and protect what we have.